The Poet : Chapters 4 and 5

 

FOUR

 

The Modern Era Gallery was packed by the time I got there. It was a small space. Small spaces ruled Brooklyn. High rents ran the show. The gallery had a narrow front room to display art. The back room was for the performances. The current art looked like scribbles done by a five-year-old. Still seeing some of the prices on the art work provided me with a quick money-making scheme the next time my library did a finger-painting program for toddlers.

Another weeknight shot to shit at a poetry reading. I could’ve used another drink. I’d killed my pint of vodka on the walk to the reading, and you couldn’t get drunk in bars in Williamsburg unless you were heir to a small inheritance. Six dollars a draft constituted a happy hour. Happy for whom? How could anyone get a buzz at those prices? These Millennial hipster kids were aliens. I had no clue how they decompressed. Maybe cell phones and binge-watching television shows were drug enough. But I couldn’t be too hard on them. With the way this country was going, if I had to work until seventy, they’d all be working until they were dead.

 “There you are,” Killian said. He was standing behind an old dilapidated bar that had been converted into a merch table, and was covered in poetry books from the various readers, present company excluded. All Rand ever wanted was his book, but instead he got a poetry community. Killian’s brown cardigan was all that stopped us from looking like flannel clad, faded jeans twins. That and the fifty pounds I had on him. “You skipped the pre-reading happy hour.”

“I’m not coming to the pajama party either,” I said.

“Well now you’re just being rude.”

“Where’s Gigi?”

“I have no clue,” Killian said. “I only employ her. I don’t keep a chain around her neck.”

“Good. My ego has been chipped at enough today. Some homeless musician threatened to punch me out because I wouldn’t give him a library card without proper I.D. The last thing I need is one of Jackson Urban’s harem giving me shit.”

“As you’ve taken to calling her in person and online almost daily since Cornelia Street, Rand,” he said. “That said it would be a very hard thing for me to do, as your very oldest friend, banning you from the store for being a misogynist and a budding internet troll.”

“Gigi’s the one who called me a fascist first,” I said. “And I wasn’t even suggesting we round up all of the artists and put them in camps. I merely meant we should slap them around a little bit for creating tepid and banal shit. Okay, maybe lock up a couple of Hollywood actors and actresses for shits and giggles, but…”

“You sound like that orange-hued moron running for president.”

“I sound nothing like him,” I said. “You forget. I’m the originator of the falafel taco. I love Muslim and Latino people so much I mix their cuisines together. Unless they’re poets. Then they can go to hell.”

“You can see where Gigi could be offended though,” Killian said.

“I actually meant what I said as a wakeup call.” I pointed to a cooler behind the bar. Killian handed me a tall can of something I didn’t recognize. “Let’s take a look at the way the world is now, shall we? Wars everywhere. Refugee epidemics. Right-wing, extremist lunatics running for office. Perpetual gun violence. People hoped up on opioids playing video games for days straight. Climate change disasters. Potato chips with strange flavor combinations and people drinking something called coconut milk. And is anyone writing about this stuff? Singing songs about the horror? Making movies about social injustice? No. They’re all just walking around with their heads buried in their phones eating chipotle-dill flavored artisan kettle chips. I’m sorry, but a meme of Willy Wonka shaming people for cultural genocide, whatever that is, is not social change.”

“You’re saying The Asshole at the End of the Bar is a revolutionary pamphlet?” Killian said. “That basically Dive Bar Press is sitting on the next Thomas Paine or Philip Freneau?”

“Phili…. all I’m saying is that there are sixteen-year-old girls out there who’ve only lived under war,” I said. “And in two years they’re going to need a guy like me to comfort them as they navigate this barbarically fascist landscape that we’re setting up in tandem with the good ol’ sturdy foundation of white supremacy and the patriarchy.”

“You’re forgetting the flavored potato chips, Pal,” Killian said.

“Never. And all I was just trying to tell Gigi was that we need real artists out there now. It’s time for her generation to step up seeing as we Xer’s have failed and are now a part of the system with our money and property and television franchise reboots. The last thing we need is a book about a teenager with magical powers whose LGBT sensitive and lives in an urban dystopia.”

“Pretty much the plot of one of Gee’s books,” Killian said. “And, once again, Rand, it’s LGBTQIA.”

“It’s the vowels that get me,” I said. “And I have dystopia right outside my front door.”

“No you don’t,” he said.

“There are two bumper stickers for the orange-faced billionaire stuck to a street cleaning sign, and I have a red-eyed hound from hell who barks at me from across the street. Tell me that’s not dystopia.”

“And what money and property do we have? Last I checked I was living paycheck to paycheck and we both rented.”

“I was talking about our betters,” I said. “The ones who didn’t get English lit degrees and fucked off from our classes for pastries and bottomless cups of coffee.”

“By the way you’re reading last.”

“I’m the show stopper?” I said.

“Tricia Thread cancelled,” Killian said. “Claims she had to meet her agent to talk about a follow up. No one else wanted to read last, so you’re as show-stoppery as we’re getting tonight.”

“First time out the memoir box and that bag of cheese gets an agent, a two-book deal and a tepid review in the New York Times,” I said. “Explain to me how that happens for some people.”

“She didn’t skip classes in college? Luck?”

“Luck my ass.” I had some beer. It tasted of burnt wheat. “I’m surprised half the poets in this borough haven’t gone after Thread with pitchforks and torches for what she wrote about them.”

Killian laughed. He had a pull on his beer. It went down easy. I must’ve been missing something. “Let’s not forget her poem book about Miley Cyrus.”

“I’m still traumatized by it,” I said. “Fidel publishes that crap yet I’m sitting on his PC in permanent PDF mode.”

“I dare not say the word manana,” Killian said.

“That word means fuck you, Rand in Spanish.” I took down half the beer. Something called an IPA. Decades on a desert island and I’d never get used to the taste. If this was all there was to drink, I’d become temperate, maybe do something of value with my life. Nah, I’d probably just adapt and declare myself King IPA.

“I think fuck you, Rand, is a phrase,” Killian said.” Jodete, Rand, if I’m correct.”

“Careful with the Mexican,” I said. “I have a co-worker that’ll have you deported without question.”

“Is this the one printing poems?”

“Who knows?” I said. I took down the rest of the wretched tasting sludge. In the end free beer was free beer. “They’re all conspiring against me. I have this one old fucker; I can’t even get him to come to work.”

Killian got me another then leaned on the bar old timey style. “Well, paybacks are a bitch” he said.

“Paybacks?”

“Rand, how many supervisors have you nudged toward an early retirement?”

“I gave those fiends excitement,” I said. Killian shrugged. “I gave them verve. Those men were all working and living on autopilot until I showed up with a fudged application and stained uniform in hand, and a general unwillingness to punch a time card. Without me entering their lives those scoundrels would never know the value of retirement.” I looked around for Larissa. “And where is our little Wiccan social networking exhibitionist this evening?”

“Waiting to read…and I don’t think Larissa is a witch,” Killian said. “I think she’s emo. Or punk.” He cracked a new beer. “Honestly, I’m too old to tell the difference now.”

A loud burp rang throughout the gallery. Burly Francis Dune tapped the mic on the stage with a beer clamped paw, and there was a deafening thud throughout. He stood there. Bearded. Flannel. Immaculate. He had his hand over his eyes scanning the room like a battlefield general. On average Francis could kill a case by himself, and he could write a motherfucker into the dirt. He burped into the mic again as people took their seats. He started his introductions. I stared at the room while I imbibed the new miserable experience of beer two. I’d kill for vodka. The room was purple. Purple was a royal or calming color. Maybe it gave people seizures. I didn’t know. There was more bad art on the wall. Paintings this time. Red and black smears. De Kooning on his worst day. I looked for a seat but there wasn’t shit left. Standing room only for poetry on a working man’s weeknight. America really was heading in a bad direction.

“It usually this ominous,” I said, too loud.

“You know we always draw well,” Killian whispered.

“The dead leading the dead.”

Someone in the crowd hushed me, as Larissa Haven-St. Claire took the stage. Truth be told she wasn’t much different on stage than in her Facebook pictures. That night she was wearing a black Sid and Nancy t-shirt as a dress, like the Sonic Youth one before it, that complemented her pale, tattooed muscled legs and those black combat boots. Larissa did the jet-black hair better than most. It looked almost natural on her, the way it curved to her breasts. Ah, to be entangled in that. I was sure she was pushing thirty but she was still writing poems about how her high school boyfriend had treated her like shit, how all men treated her like shit. Men at college. Men at work. Men on buses and trains. Men standing in line to get their morning cup of coffee. All men were dogs in Larissa’s world. She was one-hundred percent correct from what I’d seen of my gender. Yours truly was ready for a good matriarchy.

“It’s senseless for me to use paper in a world of so much waste,” Larissa said by way of an opening. “Tonight, I’m going to read poems from my blog on my tablet.” She held up her thin silver sliver of technology for the hoi polloi to gaze at in wonder. I wondered if she had a poem about the poor Chinese kids forced to make those fucking things. I know I had a poem about some asshole on the bus playing a video game at top volume for our whole thirty-minute ride through crawling Brooklyn streets. I called it: Angry Bird Me Again and I’ll Sink You into the Depth of My Own Malaise.

“That seems fair,” I said to Killian. “But maybe she should’ve written them using organic coffee grounds. And blood. Poets love to write in blood.” Another poetry lover shushed me. I had more beer. I spied Larissa’s legs. One of the tattoos might’ve been a pentagram.

“This first one is called Ode to your Wayward Salamander,” she said. I’d seen this poem online. Larissa had a YouTube page where she sat in front of a black background and read her poems clad only in a Morrissey t-shirt and knee-high white boots. Salamander was a euphemism for penis from what I’d gathered in repeated viewings.

She started reading the poem, and it went something like this:

There you went

there you went

back under the little rock

again

of yours…

I closed my eyes and drifted off into La-la Land where I wasn’t at a poetry reading. I was somewhere where Carolina hadn’t hijacked my life for her novel, and there were no hangovers or shitty writing mornings, loud neighbors or idiot employees. I was some far-off place where putting my head between Larissa’s inked thighs was a requirement and a duty that I took on with noble intent. I was out maybe a minute, just getting started on the fantasy, rolling Larissa on her stomach, when suddenly her dull cadence broke. She was on stage staring down at her tablet. Then Larissa started moving around. She went back and forth across the stage like she dropped her cat-eyed glasses or lost a contact or had to take a shit. Perhaps she was a performance artist as well as poet, painter, filmmaker, actress, guru, yoga instructor, spiritual guide, co-op volunteer, general provocateur and…whatever else her Facebook page said that she did.

“Ummm,” Larissa said. “I lost my internet connection.” There was a hush in the crowd. Climate Change. Genocide. Terrorism. A dropped WiFi connection. We were living in hard times. Some people checked their cell phones in solidarity, trying to find that lost connection. Some Pad-hole picked up his own tablet and shook it like an Etch-A-Sketch. People started shouting that they had the internet. It was a subtle mutiny. “Then could someone check the cables or something? I mean, like, my poetry blog is the only medium that I have to access my art this evening. You know if we can’t provide for those of us actually trying to save the environment then what does that say about us as a species?”

“She is aware that the internet runs on electricity?” I said to Killian. “Which is currently powered by coal.”

“When did you become the environmentalist?”

“When it became eighty-one degrees in New York in late October,” I said. “And today I helped some hot Chinese coed with her paper on emerging fuel technologies. Personally, I was amazed at the lengths I went to for a smiling seventeen-year-old unseasonably clad in biker shorts.” I got shushed again.

“Then you should be digging this, man,” Killian said. “Larissa’s doing it exactly how you told Gee it should be done.”

“I’ll believe her when she goes to Syria to read poems.” I looked at the poetry table. Larissa had more books, chapbooks, manifestos, pamphlets and broadsides than everyone else combined. She’d helped kill more trees than a northwestern lumberjack hopped up on amphetamines, coffee and eminent domain. “Or I’ll believe it when fair Ms. Haven-St. Claire goes strictly e-book or…”

I was shushed again. I killed beer two as Larissa continued walking about the stage. She finally found her Internet connection somewhere toward the back where the mic wouldn’t reach and where the spotlight wouldn’t go. She finished her set by shouting in the semi-dark. Of course, Larissa read over her time limit. As she left the stage people weren’t sure whether to clap or not. They all checked their cell phones instead.

“You did great,” I said, when she walked past me. Larissa Haven-St. Claire looked none too pleased by what transpired on stage.

“Oh great,” she said, “More mockery from the patriarchy himself.”

Then I watched her strut into the gallery and grab this big black coat off the rack, before angrily walking that yoga sculpted ass right outside the door.

 

 

                                                                             FIVE

 

“Where’s she reading next?” I asked. “Gitmo?”

“Park Slope,” Killian said.

“Semantics.” I had some beer. “I don’t think she likes me very much.”

“You work on a sliding scale of emotion with most people.” We were quiet a moment. “By the way did Carolina forgive you yet?” Against all reason I flipped through a few of Larissa’s books, mostly to get to the author picture at the end.

“Forgiven me? She’s the one purloining my life for so-called art. I should be forgiving her, or, at very least make her buy the drinks. Provided she answers my email.”

“Fidel wants her book,” Killian said. “He wants you to talk to her.”

“About a book making the fool of me?” I put Larissa’s book down; some tome called Damage Me, and pointed to the small mass of dead trees arrayed in the erotic way only a seasoned bookseller could display. “As soon as I see my book here, I’ll maybe mention something. Until then my advocacy for Dive Bar Press runs thin.”

Then the next sensitive, snowflake of a poet took the stage. Jackson Urban. Jackson had his hair in those little twisted dreads that looked like they gave their wearer a headache. His soul patch was groomed, and he was rocking retro flip-shades and a t-shirt with a Keith Haring painting plastered on front. I knew Jackson enough for him not to like me and me not to like him most days. And it wasn’t even a racial thing. It was an asshole thing. He’d deleted me at least three times as his Facebook friend, the last time because I’d called him a hipster for shopping at Whole Foods and for using an assortment of buzzwords it would take me a research grant to keep up with. Jackson Urban wasn’t even his real name.

It was Reggie Jackson.

Jackson had his poems folded into his back pocket because he was keeping it real. He pulled them out and stared at the folded pages. He stared the crowd down as if in a room full of enemies, even though the bulk of our multi-ethnic, multi-cultural crowd were there to see him. Maybe he just hated the art work on the walls. I tried staring down an audience once, but some do-gooder took it for me being blind, and after my set they told me all about his fantastic ophthalmologist and the wonders of progressive lenses. Some people had that magical danger aura about them, and others got good eye care advice.

“Do you ever just have to wake up and write a poem?” Jackson said. The crowd couldn’t tell if this was a threat or a challenge, but they hooted and hollered anyway. Jackson waited them out. A few Christian soldiers started nodding along. “I mean really get up, see that sun in the sky, and just have to write a poem?”

“Is this pre or post morning beer shit?” I said. I got hushed again. But I got a few laughs too. The alternative version of me was somewhere in Hollywood writing sitcom scripts and dating moody, sexually ambiguous actresses who wanted to be taken seriously for their art, but instead made vampire and werewolf films in order to keep the money rolling in.

Jackson heard the laughter. He lifted a hand to his head so that he could see beyond the spotlight. “Poetry isn’t a joke. Now if we’re done making a charade of this evening,” He continued, “I’d like to read you something I wrote inspired by…”

“…Bob Kaufman,” I said. I got hushed. I got laughs. I didn’t fucking care.

…. Bob Kaufman,” Jackson said. “I call it Don’t Hang your White Aesthetic on Me All Because My Clothes are Gap-worn.”

And his little ditty went something like this:

I believe when I die

I’ll finally be Gap-worn

two-hundred-dollar pair of jeans

and a fifty dollar

oxford

the real american aesthetic

the dull

the haggard

the white man’s jive…

 

When Jackson was done with a poem, he crumpled them into balls and threw them over his shoulder back toward that gloomy concave of darkness where Larissa Haven-St. Claire had been forced to stand. What was with poets and discarding their writing on stage? Maybe I should try setting mine on fire or doing origami next time. I could make everyone a paper wine jug.

Jackson stepped away from the mic to wipe his mouth. He was like Miles Davis in that way. “This next one I don’t even know if I should read.” Jackson always had a poem he wasn’t sure he should read. I had stacks of poems that I shouldn’t read, but that was because they were for shit. “Words just too raw to me still.” Then he launched into another poem. It was entitled These Nike Strings like Nooses like AmeriKKKA at the Foot Locker Store. It went a little something like this:

Dog don’t eat no dog

they don’t shuck and jive

disciples they economize

on the sweat shop floor

ameriKKKA

teenage kids on courts

dangling nike strings like nooses

hustling their fat asses

at the foot locker store…

Jackson Urban went over time as well. But it didn’t matter. The people ate it up. They gave him a standing ovation and he stood there on stage as if he deserved it. He did. Jackson had taught us all some hard lessons about capitalism and product placement. The chick who’d been filming him, who was a noted bad poet too, came up on stage and hugged him. Someone handed them a picture of the orange-faced billionaire. Jackson ripped it to shreds. Then he and the chick took a selfie together. He didn’t smile. She did. The photo would be on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter before I even exhaled.

“You’re next,” Killian said to me.

I realized that with one pint of hooch and two cans of beer I wasn’t nearly drunk enough to do this. “Another round, bartender,” I said. Killian handed me another sweating can, as Francis called halftime on the reading because people were so overwhelmed by Jackson that they couldn’t go on. I took my beer and went outside.

“You know you can’t drink that out here,” a voice said. I looked to my left and out of the shadows came Larissa Haven-St. Claire with that t-shirt dress, with those boots, and that big, black leather coat over top it all. She had cigarette on a long stem. It was an e-cigarette.

“Aren’t you hot in that,” I said.

“It’s going to get colder,” Larissa said.

“I meant it as a statement. All the same you really need to brighten the wardrobe.”

She didn’t look amused. “Why not tell me I need to smile more as well.”

“Smiling is for Republicans, Evangelicals and the damned.” I had some beer. Larissa wasn’t my usual type, which meant she wasn’t a stressed out, drunken divorcee in a bar bitching about her job, ex-husband or kids, or a twenty-year-old who’d laugh me into embarrassment. But there was something about the teenage death chick look she was still rocking. I’d never had a goth girl, emo girl, whatever. I’d also never had a Black or Latina girl either or really any women but white women. But I’d heard forty was the new twenty, so as long as the liver held up, I still had a shot at vast and varied experimentation. “Where’s that wacky Gigi at?”

“Why are you always chasing girls twenty years younger than you,” Larissa said. Then she sucked on her e-pipe. It turned bright blue like something out of sci-fi film. E-smokes and smartphones. We were becoming more and more robotic by the hour.

“How do I expect to stay fit,” I said.

“You could try jogging instead of being an embarrassing stereotype.”

“Maybe I should take up yoga.”

An eyebrow rose. Yeah, I’d looked at those Facebook pictures. “I’d pay to see that,” Larissa said. She sucked on her e-smoke again. The scent of cherry blossom hit the unnaturally warm November air.

“Smoking is a bad habit too.”

“Touché, Mr. Wyndham.”

“I really meant what I said by the way,” I said. “You did do great tonight.”

Larissa gave me a side look. “I’d be a fool if I believed you, Rand.”

“I’m serious. You’re one of the only people still taking on the whaling industry, and that says something in this day and age of disposable commerce and mass self-involvement.”

“Thank you, I guess. The Wi-Fi is for shit here,” she said. “I’ll need to remember that for next time.” We were silent as Larissa smoked. I drank some beer and thought about that Facebook picture of her covering her ass in nothing but smiling skull underwear. “I suppose I should do something benevolent like invite you to my after-party.”

“I never went all in for hokey religions like benevolence” I said. “But thanks.”

“None of that drunk and crazy stuff that you write about.”

“I’m too old for drunk and crazy,” I said.

“Your poems are fake?” Larissa said.

“They’re old at this point. At least the ones about the bar are old.”

Larissa put her e-smoke into the pocket of the big leather coat and came closer. In the light in the front of the Modern Era she looked a lot softer than this dark, hard emo-punk thing she had going. The eyes were baby blue. “I’d love to see that bar.”

“It’s gone the way of all the old relics,” I said. “It’s a sports bar now.”

“Everything is,” Larissa said. “America and its sports obsession. Imagine if we cared about the environment as much as football. Or…”

“All those Chinese people making iPhones and iPads.”

“Touché again, Rand Wyndham.” We were silent a second. She looked like she was considering me. For what I had no clue. A pagan sacrifice? A tear tattoo under my left eye. “So will you come to the party?”

“Parties are for assholes and people who need constant amusement,” I said.

“I knew you’d say something like that,” Larissa said.

“I’ve become tired and predictable to you already?”

“No, I can just tell you want people to work for it.”

“It’s the former fat kid in me,” I said. “I’m never certain of anyone’s adulation or love. I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“Hmmm….do you see a therapist?”

“I don’t even talk to a bartender anymore,” I said.

Larissa fanned herself with some poet’s book. “It really is so humid.”

“November in New York,” I said. I pointed at the coat. “Also, you’ve got a dead beast draped over you.”

“Excuse me?” She stepped back and turned like she was modeling the coat for me. I just watched those yoga-muscled legs cozy in those combat boots. Maybe I did have a dark side where women were concerned. “This is faux leather.”

“No faux animals were harmed?” I said.

“Ha…ha…ha.” Larissa faked. She looked up into the starless Brooklyn sky. “It is frightening,” she finally said. “All of these people thinking this is nice weather when they should be terrified. No wonder we can’t get decent climate change policy passed.”

“Weak assholes love to go to the park and never shiver,” I said. “Me? I’m more of a dead of winter type. More a dark bar on a sunny day man.”

“I like that we have climate change between us,” Larissa said.

“And don’t forget the yoga.”

“Are we even Facebook friends, Rand? Or are you like a super, poet-bro troll?”

Luckily Fidel came up the street, so I didn’t have to go into lurker/stalker territory with Larissa. He had his arms around two women and couple more of them trailing behind him. Some men had it, and some men looked at pictures of emo-punk poets posing with their ass upright whilst in a red bikini. How’d she even take that photo? I hazard to guess.

“Little Bukowski,” Fidel said to me. He had sunglasses on and was wearing a dark blazer and white shirt unbuttoned half-way. With the long hair and shaggy beard, we were suddenly back at Studio 54. Fidel wore climate change well.

I took a hit on my beer. “Fidel if you were anyone else, I’d deck you. If you were El Nino I’d strike you where you stand. There’s a table full of books in there and a room packed full of inheritance wealthy hipsters just throwing it away on Jackson Urban, and not a copy of The Asshole at the End of the Bar to be seen.”

“Peace brother.” We bro-hugged. “The book is coming. Your mas-ter-piece is close to finished. But tonight is not about commerce, it’s for genius and art.”

“Shit, you came to the wrong place.” I winked at Larissa and she crossed her arms.

“I’m always in the right place,” Fidel said

“Are you responsible for Jackson Urban being here,” I said. “I’ve been out here for five minutes and I can still feel the bile rising.”

“Jackson happens to be a genius,” Larissa said.

“Is that why you stormed out and missed his set?”

“He’s topical.”

“So is anyone who spends five minutes reading online comment pages.”

“You don’t think what he says resonates?” Larissa said.

I did. But I wasn’t giving Jackson Urban the satisfaction of taking up the mantle of the next LeRoi Jones. At least not while he kept whining to me about purloined drinks and superhero movies being the new American colossus. “Talking to most of America about social issues and race relations is like talking to your obese, deaf and blind uncle who just wants more gravy on his meat.”

“That makes no sense,” she said. “And what are you? A walking metaphor tonight?”

“You’ll have to do better than metaphor if you want to compliment me,” I said.

Fidel laughed. “I love watching people court,” he said.

“I’m not…” Larissa started.

But Fidel walked inside the Modern Era with his posse. Larissa hesitated a second but then she mouthed the party and joined them. I stayed outside and drank my beer, and thought about emo-punk yoga, the fine art of photography and truly learning the definition of a metaphor. The shops and cafes along Wythe Avenue were bright and lively. Some were still seating people outdoors. No one truly cared that our world was dying. I felt sort of sick. I assumed it was from hearing bad poetry, or sweating my ass off. I was desolate and hollow.

I kept coming back to that book. All that work I’d put into it. All those nights not getting quite bombed so I could get up the next morning relatively sober and put down words instead of beer shits. All so I could write about my life. All so I could get something down for me, to prove that Rand Wyndham existed. A poetry book instead of a life. Ten months of my life plotting and planning the novel too, just to have Carolina show up at Cornelia Street and flush it all down the toilet. Okay, ten months of thinking about the novel and writing one sentence. But ten months was ten months.

“Pal.” I turned toward Modern Era and Killian had his head poking outside the door. “It’s your turn.”

I went to shoot down the rest of my beer. I discovered there was no beer. There were only dregs left in my can. I took it. I turned and started trudging into the gallery. I could hear the Francis Dune burping and introducing me. I threw a couple of jabs at the bad art hanging on the wall. I found my poem folder where I’d left it. Killian tossed me a beer. I scowled at Jackson Urban and licked my lips at the sight of Larissa Haven-St. Claire’s legs. She caught my eye. I winked. She turned away and shook her head. It was time to do what I did. Be the poet. Commit suicide for the blood thirsty bastards.